Starting any wine app randomly changes audio output device a few times

Wild Penguin · 2024-11-10 14:19:39

Hi,

For a "while" (month? two?) I've had this annoying change in wine applications (games) and how they use the audio system.

The main audio device will be changed a few times whenever I start any game (and, I presume, other applications but I use few) using wine. Whether this is something using Proton via Steam, from the Heroic launcher or Lutris, has no effect, the behavior is the same. I haven't tried to manually make a wine prefix and try without any launchers.

What I'm observing in detail is this:

Let's say, I'm listening to some music (trough my separate speakers connected to MB integrated sound card via optical), with some native appliation (mpv, strawberry or Firefox) and start a non-native game. All audio will suddenly start blasting trough my display speakers for a few seconds. Then it will switch back to the device I had originally selected. Then back to the monitor. Then again back to my speakers. I can also see OSD popups from KDE Plasma to indicate the changing audio device. It will eventually settle to the one I had originally selected as the default.

This is extremely annoying and unsettling, as my monitor defaults to a much higher level I've selected on my speakers. Yet alone, if I was using headphones, it will wake up everyone in the house.

To add to insult, sometimes running wine will also change the profile for the integrated MB sound card device to some analog one - which means it will be unselectable from the UI (I presume this is because no analog device is connected, and the driver recognizes this), or will not produce any audio trough the optical connection. This is extremely confusing as there is no indication what is going on, but I've noticed this by change by going to the audio settings. Reverting the change is trivial but annoying. I believe this only happens when I was using my headphones (connected to a separate USB sound card), when I was not actually using the MB optical output at the time.

I have not noticed that any native applications (not using wine) would do this. But it most certainly seems reproduceable, 100% of the time, with any wine application;

TL;DR: i.e. wine has become "invasive" and screws up my audio setup.

I'm using KDE Plasma, pipewire and wireplumber (also, pipewire-pulse).

Any ideas as to the possible cause or how to start troubleshooting? Or, anyone faced a similar issue?

Cheers!

Last edited by Wild Penguin (2024-11-10 14:22:04)

seth · 2024-11-10 15:27:50

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wine#Sound
Do you have more luck w/ pipewire-alsa?

Wild Penguin · 2024-11-11 21:19:46

This sounds exactly like the issue I'm having: https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?t=38937

FWIW I'm using X.org atm (there were still some workflow-breaking regressions in Plasma on Wayland last time I tried regarding the kb/input layer, so still lingering on X.Org).

I'll see if pipewire-alsa makes any difference!

Arch Linux

#1 2024-11-10 14:19:39

Starting any wine app randomly changes audio output device a few times

#2 2024-11-10 15:27:50

Re: Starting any wine app randomly changes audio output device a few times

#3 2024-11-11 21:19:46

Re: Starting any wine app randomly changes audio output device a few times

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